In Part V, we look at the great War Crimes Trials of history: in particular, the Nuremburg and Tokyo Trials that took place in the aftermath of World War II, in which Nazi leaders of the Third Reich and important officials of Japanese government were convicted. We also investigate the high profile trials of individuals such as Dusko Tadic, the Bosnian Serb convicted of crimes against humanity, and Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Serbia and Yugoslavia, who died before his trial came to an end in 2006.
Part VI continues with a look at twentieth-century war crimes and atrocities between 1950 and the year 2000, starting in 1950 with the No Gun Ri Tragedy, in which US troops gunned down inhabitants of a village in the early days of the Korean War, and ending with the nightmare of Rwanda, in which over one million people were massacred by Hutu militia groups over a period of about four months in 1994. Other notorious crimes of the period include the massacre at My Lai of unarmed Vietnamese civilians, mostly women and children, by US soldiers in 1968; the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1972, in which British soldiers shot down a group of Irish civil rights protesters; atrocities committed during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor from 1975 until 1999; and the massacres of hundreds of Arab refugees at Sabra and Shatila, carried out in September 1982 by Lebanese militias, with the support of the Israeli armed forces.
War crimes and atrocities continue, sadly, in great numbers into the twenty-first century, with the evil regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq; the subsequent invasion of Iraq led by the USA; the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay; the war in Kosovo; and ethnic cleansing, also described as genocide, at Darfur in Western Sudan.
Today, it seems that war crimes and atrocities continue day by day, despite the mass of legislation aimed to prevent and limit such tragedies. However, the fact that the legislation is now in place to identify such crimes and charge the perpetrators is significant: for example, on 5 November, 2006, former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death by hanging for his crimes against humanity. Whether or not such convictions will help to stem the tide of tyranny and terrorism of the twenty-first century, in which innocent people continue to suffer, remains to be seen; but at least in modern times, war crimes have been identified as such, so that – whether committed by heads of state or by terrorist groups – we can begin to regard such crimes as having no rightful place in our modern global society.
PART ONE: ANCIENT ATROCITIES
The Sword of David Carves Out the Kingdom of Israel
The Bible’s Old Testament books of I and II Samuel, I Chronicles and I Kings are full of the deeds of David, a farmer of Bethlehem who created and was the first ruler of the kingdom of Israel and Judah. In the Bible, David is a strong and extraordinarily successful warrior, a gifted poet and musician – he is invariably depicted in Christian iconography with a harp – and, in startling contrast, a murderous adulterer. David slew the landowner Nabal so that he could make Nabal’s wife, Abigail, his own wife. She was one of many, as David was both promiscuous and fecund. He also sent a gallant soldier, Uriah the Hittite, to certain death by putting him in ‘the forefront of the battle’ so that David could gain Bathsheba, Uriah’s wife.
David is a much more shadowy figure in the historical records of the period in which it is generally agreed that he lived – that is, ten centuries before the birth of Christ, with his death occurring, at the earliest, in 1018 bc but no later than c. 970 bc. As many records from this period do not mention him at all, it is impossible to assign any more definite dates than these to him. Modern historians agree that around 1003 bc, a strong and warlike man called David did combine the states of Israel and Judah to create a kingdom whose size was unmatched by anything else in the history of Israel. He seems to have built the kingdom by using ferocious military energy to overcome the states and tribes that surrounded and threatened Israel.
King David entered biblical history as a simple shepherd boy, whom God directed the prophet Samuel to seek out and anoint as the Lord’s chosen one. He was taken into the court of Saul, the first king of Israel, initially as a musician. David became the beloved of Saul’s son Jonathan and was raised to a position of military command after his spectacular slaying of the giant Philistine champion Goliath.
David married Saul’s daughter, Michal, whose wedding gift from her husband was the foreskins of 200 Philistines David had slaughtered in an encounter with Israel’s foremost enemy at the time. However, David’s increasing power and popularity in Israel attracted Saul’s jealous displeasure, so much so that David fled Saul’s court and became an outlaw.
With a force of 400 warriors at his command, David established himself as a free-ranging warrior, moving from valley to valley and camp to camp in the wilderness of Judah, where he acted with murderous cruelty when occasion demanded. A base in this early period of his wanderings was the cave of Adullam, near Gath, a city-state whose king was a Philistine vassal. David thus operated as an ally of the Philistines, whose confederation of city-states on the coastal land of Canaan lay to the west of Israel, and who were perpetually at war with Saul and Israel. Eventually, David established himself and his forces in the city of Ziklag.
It was the destruction of Ziklag by the Amalekites that first allowed David to demonstrate just how ruthless he could be. Amalek and his descendents had long been an unrelenting enemy of Israel, and Saul had recently made an unsuccessful attempt to deal with them. David was away from Ziklag, intending to ally himself alongside the Philistines in their last struggle with Saul. However, the Philistines, apparently considered David to be a treacherous ally and refused his help. Returning to Ziklag, David and his men found the city reduced to smouldering ruins, and their wives, including two of David’s, their daughters and their sons taken away as captives of the Amalekites.
At first, the distraught people of Ziklag threatened to stone David, but he persuaded them to visit their vengence on the Amalekites instead and to accompany him in pursuit of their lost wives and children. Eventually David caught up with the Amalekites, ‘spread abroad upon all the earth, eating and drinking, and dancing, because of all the great spoil they had taken out of the land of the Philistines and out of the land of Judah’.
David descended on this drunken hoard and slaughtered them, the work lasting from twilight on the day he caught up with them until the evening of the next day. David rescued his wives and the wives and children of his followers, and everything else that had been looted from Ziklag by the Amalekites. He also took all their flocks and herds and drove them back to Ziklag. The Amalekites were wiped out, except for ‘four hundred young men, which rode upon camels and fled’, and the Amalekite state was never again a threat to Israel.
Saul and his three sons, including Jonathan, were killed in battle with the Philistines, and their bodies, stripped of their armour and their heads cut off, were fastened to the wall of Bethshan. ‘The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen… and the weapons of war perished,’ mourned the poetical David. At the same time, according to Samuel, David taught the children of Judah the use of the bow: the practicalities of warfare would always come before poetry to David. (He had also slain the messenger who brought the news of the deaths of Saul and Jonathan.)